Along the Path

I've talked a lot about various things Lawson saw on this site, and I've talked a bit about the tools I'm using to describe what I see as I follow his path. A good bit of how I'm going about that I learned 20 years ago, on a remarkable project called An Appalachian Adventure, which documented a sort of group relay through-hike of the Appalachian Trail, the 2,200-mile footpath that stretches from Georgia to Maine.

Backpacker Magazine, October 1995.

That project combined the resourced of five newspapers -- the Hartford Courant, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Maine Sunday Telegram and Portland Press-Herald, and the Raleigh News & Observer. It should tell you all you need to know about how important that project was to me that today, 20 years later, I could type in each one of those newspaper names perfectly, with hyphens and ampersands and so forth all correct. (The Atlanta paper, by the way, is so in love with its AJC abbreviation that to check the hyphen I had to go to Wikipedia -- I couldn't find the actual paper name on the website. But I checked, and it's right.) Each paper had reporters and photographers and artists hike a segment of the trail, in order, and report in once a week. All five papers ran every story -- 32 in total, if I recall correctly. As Backpacker Magazine noted, "the effort even ha[d] its own page on the World Wide Web." Gracious! The link is now dead, of course, and most of the stories live in that flickering half-light of the morgues of newspapers that just cannot figure out for the life of them some sort of way to put old stories online. Oh, if only there were some kind of technology for that! Here's a link to a summary story from the AJR, but if any of the rest is online I can't find it. It did become a book though. You can order it!

Anyhow, I even bring it up because to celebrate the 20th anniversary of our joint adventure, many of us fortunate enough to be paid to go hiking back in the day got together last week at Harpers Ferry to remember, walk, visit with the people at the Appalachian Trail Conference, and eat and drink, as you do. We had a large time.

We took lots of pictures of us all trailed up and in front of mountains and such. This seems more representative of our visit.

First among equals Steve Grant -- it was his adventure series in the Hartford Courant that got things started -- now teaches yoga. Here he practices on the Weverton Cliffs overlook. He led us in a preparatory round, but in my pictures everybody has their butts out and looks silly.

We talked a good bit about changes in technology. Everything the Lawson Trek does instantly, alone, and on the spot -- updating blog posts from barrier islands, Instagraming from canoe in the middle of the Intracoastal Waterway -- the Appalachian Adventure crew had to do in ways far more complex and with a support staff of dozens.

The photographers all talked about souping film in hotel room sinks or dropping it off at Walmart, then picking up the negatives and using scanners to ship chosen images to photo editors. Reporters recall using early laptops like the Toshiba T1000 (a svelte 9 pounds!) and wiggling telephone plugs to make decent connections to download stories to the editor. We all had drivers who would pick up our stuff and drive it along to our next weekly stops. The News & Observer even had a telephone service by which I put tape-recorded sounds (hiking, interviews, even playing the recorder I think) onto a system readers could dial in and hear. Quel interactive! I even carried a camera for a local TV station on our first trip, which meant bringing back a camera, having them look at the video, setting it up, and then interviewing me in a local park while they showed the video. I had to comment on it without watching, because having me and the anchors see the video at the same time was just too crazy.

It's all obviously different now. I live-stream with Periscope, share photos instantly with Instagram, automatically update pages on Facebook and Twitter, and carry nothing heavier than a tablet that weighs less than a pound, though even then I rarely use it -- I carry my phone, a Bluetooth keyboard, and a set of lenses that stick to the phone, and I'm prepared to shoot, edit, produce, upload, and instantly publish words, images, sounds, and video. I joke that like Lawson I'm hiking from wifi hotspot to wifi hotspot, but the reality is I'm doing journalism in a way that wasn't even possible a few years ago.

On the other hand, the journalism itself hasn't changed, and we should all remind ourselves of that. My job is still to tell the story as clearly and honestly as possible. I still need to get my facts and names straight, still need to tell a story somebody wants to read, watch, or listen to, still need to respect my story, my sources, and my medium. If my stories CAN go up faster, that doesn't mean they DO or they SHOULD. Sometimes I blog while I'm on the trail, but I found out early on that blogging daily was more than people wanted to know, so I blog only a couple times a week while I'm traveling, and sometimes less than that while off the trail. More than, say, 4 Instagram images a day is just overkill, so I very rarely do that (and when I do I am usually wrong for doing it).

When we did Appalachian Adventure, all five papers got together and set up a loose agreement on topics for each week's story -- that is, I wasn't just hiking: I was hiking and thinking about geology, and I was presumed to have done s bit of research before leaving home. That way we avoided 32 weeks of "Woohoo, look at me! Here I am on the Appalachian Trail!" and made sure certain pieces of information we needed to get in there got in.

I've done much the same. Whether it's maps or wayfinding or Native Americans or the French Huguenots or the swamps or the plants or old roads or Lawson's background or his technology or anything else, I did research before leaving, I try to drag interesting people onto the trail with me, and I try to avoid too much "Woohoo! Look at me! I'm on Lawson's Trail!" Now as then, the most interesting things to write about are the people I meet. Now as then, I am enormously behind in telling you things I haven't got around to telling you yet. Now as then, I'm the storyteller -- and the narrator. I'm your eyes and ears, bringing you to the story. I'm not the story. I forget that at my own peril.

Anyhow. It was a treat to see a bunch of wonderful journalists 20 years after we did something of which I'm still very proud. I'm still pretty impressed that they even let me hang around with them back then. And I'm hoping one or more of them will join me on the Lawson Trek before all is said and done. I'm grateful for all I learned from them, and I'm grateful to be on the trail again.

As Lawson would have said had he had the reason and the capacity, stay tuned.